Apples are a central component on Rosh Hashanah tables, from the honey dipped apples eaten at the beginning of the evening meal in the hope that they will help bring about a good and sweet new year, to the apple cake eaten at the end of a meal. Thinking about all the apple-eating that happens on this holiday, I couldn’t help but notice that more often than not apples are used in the dishes that grace the dessert table. However, while flipping through Joan Nathan’s latest cookbook Quiches, Kugels, and Couscous (I think this is definitely one of my favorite cookbooks at the moment) my assumptions about apples and desserts were dispelled when I saw the recipe for Rosh Hashanah Chicken with Cinnamon and Apples from Metz. I got extremely excited about this dish and I knew that I had to make it seeing as apples don’t often make it into the savory dishes that I cook.

Yiddish became the spoken language of the Jews who settled in the German-speaking lands and of those who emigrated from there to other countries. An interactive bilingual Hebrew-Yiddish system developed and functioned throughout the Ashkenazi cultural area, persisting until the Haskalah period.

Until the Revolution and their acceptance as citizens, most Jews lived in officially recognized autonomous communities in southwestern and northeastern France. Within these communities, they established charitable institutions, elected a governing body, defined the curriculum of their schools, registered their births, marriages and deaths and adjudicated cases in their own courts.

The dictionary definition of entrepreneur is “a person who organizes and manages any enterprise, especially a business, usually with considerable initiative and risk.” Following this definition to its logical conclusion, every pre-modern woman who managed a household was an entrepreneur since the household, at least until the seventeenth—in some places until the eighteenth—century, was an economic enterprise. For the purposes of this article, however, we have limited this broad definition of entrepreneurship, concentrating on women who specialized in commerce, selling what they themselves produced or what others produced and, in later centuries, women who were actively involved in the money economy.

Accounts of the immigrant experience, of feminist and/or activist involvement, of the changing role of women in Jewish and American life, as well as literary and political autobiographies, Holocaust survival narratives, and coming-of-age memoirs are all categories of autobiography to which American Jewish women have contributed copiously.